Share
Every country has a problem child or two in the financial services sector. America has Citigroup and Bank of America. Britain has RBS and HBOS/Lloyds.  And Germany has Hypo Real Estate. 
I have been chronicling problems at the real estate lender on this blog for some time now and last posted on HRE in April [...]

Share
My translation below is of an article from the website Finanzas.
House prices accelerated their decline in June, down 10.1% over the same month of 2008, which is three tenths more than the previous month, when housing fell 9.8%, according to an Index of Spanish real estate market (IMIE) from Tinsa.
This fall, which is typical at [...]

Share
You have probably heard the stories about China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) bidding for Repsol YP’F’s Argentine assets in a quest for more natural resources for China. Well, apparently, the Chinese want a lot more than just Argentina; they want the whole of Repsol’s Latin American asset base.
The Chinese have been buying up [...]

Share
This is a translation of a Spanish-language article from Finanzas.
For UBS, there is no debate about the economy’s green shoots despite the improvement in employment and the slowest fall in consumption and industrial production. In a harsh report on Spain, the Swiss bank says that the worst is yet to come, and that unemployment will [...]

Share
Credit in Spain is contracting at an unprecedented rate, down 33% in the first quarter as Spain faces a housing bust and near 20% unemployment. Below is my translation of part of a Spanish-language article explaining the situation.
Consumer credit fell by 33.7% in the first quarter, to €5.796 billion, and late payments rose to 17.54%, [...]

Share
We are starting to get a sense of who the winners and losers of the Great Unraveling are. Spain is definitely a loser.
Just think, a few years ago Spain was the envy of Western Europe with a dynamic and booming property market and prodigious GDP growth. The country was THE holiday-maker’s paradise, with many buying [...]

Share
We should consider Spain one of the four original bubble markets where residential property markets soared to ridiculous levels during the housing bubble.  The bubble has now popped and those countries, the U.K., the U.S., Ireland and Spain, are reeling.  To be sure, there were bubbles in other markets as well. However, these four markets [...]

Share
Spain is one of the original four bubble economies to implode.  This group includes the U.S., the U.K. and Ireland.  Unfortunately for the Spanish, in the wake of their property crash, things in Spain are looking particularly bleak with unemployment rising, GDP plummeting, and banks like Caja Castilla-La Mancha and property developers like Martinsa Fadesa and Drac [...]

Share
This comes via Edward Hugh at “A Fistful of Euros“:
The governing council of the Bank of Spain has taken the decision to intervene in the operation of the Caja after carrying out an analysis of its financial position, thus taking as read that the negotiations which might have lead to its merger with the Andalucian [...]

As recession takes hold, European citizens are starting to ask questions about how they were led into this, the deepest downturn in three-quarters of a century. The leading Spanish daily El Pais published a very thoughtful article today asking how things had unravelled so quickly and so spectacularly in Spain, previously one of the fastest growing economies in Europe.

These are the same questions that one must ask in the United States, Britain and Ireland regarding their own property bubbles. And, in view of recent turmoil in astern Europe, I suspect similar answers will be sought there as well.

This first part in a series of articles lays out the statistics of bubble and bust, demonstrating the scale of the bubble in Spain and it also makes a number of suggestion as to how to prevent a recurrence. You should note that this article points out Spain’s helplessness due to its lack of control over interest rates as a key impediment to solving the problem. Below is my translation of the article: